Hiding high on a plateau 4km northeast of Târnovo, and overlooking Tsarevets and Trapezitsa to the south, ARBANASI is one of Bulgaria's most picturesque villages, resembling a cross between a kasbah and the kind of pueblo that Clint Eastwood rids of bandits. People vanish into their family strongholds for the siesta, and at high noon only chickens stalk the rutted streets.

The origins of Arbanasi have presented scholars with a characteristically Balkan ethnological puzzle. The village's name led most historians to assume that it was founded by Albanian refugees fleeing Turkish reprisals after a failed fifteenth-century uprising, although this is disputed by modern Bulgarian historians eager to establish the continuity of Slav settlement in the area. What's beyond doubt is that the people who lived here in the village's eighteenth-century heyday belonged to the Greek cultural orbit, speaking Greek and giving their children Greek names. The inhabitants grew rich on the proceeds of cattle-droving, drying meat for their own consumption and selling the fat to the local Muslims, who considered it a delicacy. The leather was loaded onto caravans and taken east, where it was exchanged for Asiatic luxury goods like silk and spices.

Arbanasi's merchants invested their wealth in the big, fortress-like stone houses for which the village is famed, but they also endowed churches, chapels and public drinking fountains, turning the village into a lively urban centre for the local Christian population, hidden from the eyes of Ottoman-dominated Târnovo below. The town was sacked three times in the nineteenth century by the kârdzhali , Turkish outlaws who menaced the townsfolk of the Balkans, and commerce became increasingly centred on Târnovo and other lowland towns, forcing Arbanasi's merchants to relocate their businesses. Mass emigration during the war-ravaged winter of 1877 further confirmed Arbanasi's decline. Nowadays a traditional rural population coexists with a post-Communist influx of pop singers, footballers and mafia types, taking advantage of Arbanasi's traditional high-walled architecture to preserve their privacy.